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    Premier League Preview: Here We Go Again

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    The European soccer season is back. Here are the top story lines to watch this season.You will, in all likelihood, have heard the sentence already. You will certainly hear it on Friday, at least once, and then over and over again on Saturday and Sunday, delivered by every pearly toothed host and every red-faced pundit and every eager-voiced commentator. The Premier League, they will say, is back.This is not true, of course. It is an anachronism, a throwback to the days when soccer had the common decency to take the summer off and hand center stage over to other sports for a while. The Premier League — all club soccer, in fact — cannot be back, as detailed last week, because it never really goes away.Chelsea spent the Olympics signing vast quantities of South American teenagers for reasons that remain moderately opaque. Several of its domestic and European rivals used the European Championship and the Copa América as the perfect cover for hiring and firing sundry, essentially interchangeable managers.Soccer, club soccer, is a juggernaut, and the thing about juggernauts is that they do not stop rolling. They do not rest up for a few weeks, take the summer off, have a bit of a rest. That sense of permanence, that omnipresence, is what has turned soccer into less of a pastime and more of a lifestyle choice, a strikingly lucrative cultural touchstone.And yet, by some sleight of hand, those few days before a new campaign begins do somehow feel like the start of a different day. No matter how hard-boiled, how cynical, how self-aware an observer you have become, there is something about the prospect of the new season — new jerseys being worn and new signings being fielded in new stadiums, bright in summer sunshine — that captures the imagination.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Euro 2024: Success of Albania and Others Yields Euros for All of Europe

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      Eastern European countries who have in recent years lagged behind their continent’s bigger names are having their day in the sun in Germany.Edi Rama’s best friend during the World Cup summer of 1982 just so happened to be the one person he knew who owned a color television. So every evening, Rama would find himself crammed into his kitchen with countless others, desperately hoping that the fuzzy, flickering signal would hold.Albania was an island back then, under the repressive, conspiracist rule of Enver Hoxha. Foreign travel was banned for all but a select few insiders. Even communication with the outside world, particularly the West, was limited. Rama and his friends could only follow that World Cup through what he has subsequently called a “dark network” operated by RAI, the Italian state broadcaster.In a recent interview with Italy’s Tuttosport, he said that he still remembers that month warmly. Italy served as Albania’s avatar for the tournament; the two countries, in Rama’s estimation, are “a people divided by the sea, but united in everything else, similar as two drops of water.” When Dino Zoff, the Italian captain, eventually lifted the trophy in Madrid, it felt like victory in Tirana, too. “We saw it in his hands, as if it were also in ours,” Rama said.Triumph, though, was really something of a bonus. More than anything, what stayed with Rama from that summer, decades before he would become prime minister of Albania, was the sensation that there was life outside of his country. The commentators’ words, he said, “had the indescribable effect on us of not feeling alone in that black hole.”At the opening of an exhibition earlier this year about the life of Paolo Rossi, one of the great Italian heroes of that tournament, Rama put it even more eloquently. “Soccer was not only the ball and the game for us, it was the image of another world,” he said. “It was the chance to see a moving mirror, a forbidden dream.”Nedim Bajrami gave Albania the lead after only 23 seconds against Italy, the fastest goal in the history of the Euros.Alessandra Tarantino/Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Premier League Fight Intrudes on Euro 2024

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      The European Championship starts in a week. So why are the headlines about Manchester City?In front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the street has been blanketed in artificial turf, and a set of gigantic goal posts has been erected. On the waterfront in Hamburg, two dozen shipping containers have been painted in the colors of the competing nations. Part of Leipzig’s zoo has been handed over for a program of cultural events, though presumably not the bit with the tigers.Across Germany, the flags are being draped, the marketing plans are being finalized and anything bearing the logo of something other than one of UEFA’s official sponsors is being unceremoniously hidden from view. After six years of planning, the European soccer championship — Euro 2024 — is just a week away. The teams will start arriving imminently. The fans, in the hundreds of thousands, will follow close behind them.For the rest of Europe, meanwhile, these are the glorious, hazy days before the carnival begins — a time filled with bunting and sticker albums, stirring television montages, speculative lineups and sweet nostalgia. Or, rather, they should be, because it is hard not to suspect that everyone is going through the motions.It’s not that there is no appetite for a tournament traditionally outshone only by the World Cup. But it is definitely of the muted variety. All of the emotions ordinarily associated with one of soccer’s showpieces — hope, excitement, fear, wonder about how England will sabotage itself — have been overshadowed by something else, something closer to ennui.It’s almost go time in Berlin.Annegret Hilse/ReutersThe most immediate explanation for why that might be probably lies in soccer’s calendar, which has fallen out of sync in the last four years. The men’s World Cup ended only 18 months ago. The last men’s European Championship was three years ago, not four. The game’s body clock has gone awry. It is as if the sport as a whole is suffering from jet lag.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Don’t More People Resent Manchester City?

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      Out of the Champions League but on top of the Premier League, Manchester City shows that it takes more than trophies to make a villain.Silence swept from one end of the Etihad Stadium to the other, a wave of dawning realization. The background noise that a crowd cannot help but generate — the rumble and murmur of 20,000 separate conversations — fell away. Calculations were made. Conclusions were drawn.For most of Wednesday evening, the natural operating assumption was that Manchester City would advance past Real Madrid and reach yet another Champions League semifinal. Pep Guardiola’s City team was creating so many chances that victory felt, really, like a statistical inevitability. Even as the tied game ticked into extra time, the match felt strangely nerveless. City went close with a chance again. No matter. The next one would be along soon.The idea that any other ending was available did not seem to have occurred to anyone, right up to the point when Bernardo Silva and Mateo Kovacic missed their penalties in quick succession, and all of a sudden City found itself on the brink. The possibility of elimination had felt so far-fetched that its arrival almost came as a surprise.A moment later, Antonio Rüdiger was hurling himself, topless, into a morass of delirious Real Madrid fans. Jude Bellingham was leading chants in his second language. And Guardiola’s hopes of retaining the Champions League trophy had been dashed. He stood in the center circle, looking just a little lost. “What more could we have done?” he would ask later.Pep Guardiola, on the rare day when it all went wrong.Darren Staples/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt has felt for a while as if Manchester City has achieved so much, so fast, that it has had to start inventing challenges to meet. Can Guardiola win titles without a striker? Yes. What about with central defenders who are actually midfielders? Also yes. Can he craft a team capable of collecting 100 points, or winning every domestic trophy, or doing a treble? Yes, yes, yes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Coaches Have to Be Salesmen, Too

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      David Moyes has established West Ham as a fixture in the top half of the Premier League and a regular presence in Europe. So why do so many fans want him out?West Ham, in the end, could not quite withstand the barrage. Bayer Leverkusen’s first goal — a Jonas Hofmann shot that picked its way through a thronged penalty area — broke its resistance. The second, a late, artful header from Victor Boniface, shattered its hopes. The club’s Europa League adventure will likely extend no further than the quarterfinals.Still, there is no great shame in that. Leverkusen is, of course, Europe’s great form team: on an unbeaten run that now stretches to 42 games, and on the verge of claiming its first German championship. Xabi Alonso, its estimable young coach, remains on course to claim a treble — league, cup, Europa League — in his first full season.The bare facts of West Ham’s campaign are not quite as impressive, but they are admirable enough. The club sits seventh in the Premier League, above both Newcastle United and Chelsea and just a point behind Manchester United. A top-six finish remains a realistic ambition.That would mean another run at Europe next year, a fourth in succession. West Ham is starting to feel at home on the continent: It reached the Europa League semifinals in 2022, losing out to Eintracht Frankfurt, and then beat Fiorentina to claim the Europa Conference League trophy in 2023.That was West Ham’s first trophy since 1980, and only the fifth major honor in its history. David Moyes, the coach, and his team were met with a heroes’ reception and a bus parade through the streets of east London. The club’s fans have, for much of this season, delighted in making the ever-so-slightly inaccurate claim that they are “champions of Europe.”At West Ham, the good old days might be right now.Carl Recine/ReutersWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Premier League Cuts Everton’s Points Deduction

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      The decision means the club will lose six points in the standings, not 10, potentially helping it to stay in the division and to remain financially viable.Everton, a storied English soccer club trying to weather a serious financial storm, secured a modest victory on Monday when a record penalty that had sent it to the bottom of the Premier League standings was reduced on appeal.Everton’s original penalty, a 10-point deduction for financial rules violations, was reduced to six points, lifting its chances of staying in the division — and of retaining access to the tens of millions of dollars in annual revenues that a place in the Premier League brings.The successful appeal immediately lifted Everton to 15th place in the standings and eased the club’s fears of relegation and potential financial ruin. The reprieve, however, might be short-lived.The Premier League in January announced that Everton and Nottingham Forest, another club at risk of relegation, faced additional charges of breaching cost-control regulations. If the teams are found guilty, the new case will almost certainly lead to another points deduction.Everton, a founding member of the Premier League, has in recent years become a symbol for poor management and financial risk-taking. Crippled by expensive contracts and the cost of constructing a new stadium, the club faces debts of about $1 billion and continues to require regular infusions of millions of dollars in external financing to keep its operations running.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      January Transfer Window Totals: Where Have All the Deals Gone?

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      A quiet January window may not be a bubble bursting, but rather an awareness that the player-acquisition business has changed.It is not quite right to say that this has been a quiet January for soccer’s billion-dollar transfer business. The month’s ordinary soundtrack — whispers gathering, phones pinging, the machine that produces vivid chyrons for breathless television broadcasts whirring to life — might have been muted, but that does not mean there has been nothing to hear. Listen carefully, and you might make out the sound of a bubble bursting.The January transfer market is supposed to be many things, particularly in the Premier League, a place where the money flows in such great torrents that it eventually papers over almost any mistake. We expect — we want — the market to be a monument to immediate gratification. We cherish that it is panicked. We do not care if it is a source of long and lasting regret.And there are many things it is not supposed to be. Judicious, for example. Restrained. Modest. This year, January was a month in which the most noteworthy and expensive deal involved Tottenham Hotspur’s paying a perfectly reasonable price for a central defender who slotted straight into Manager Ange Postecoglou’s team.It should be no surprise, then, that this particular edition of soccer’s equivalent of Black Friday has felt, at times, like something of a bust. A year ago, Chelsea was busy spending $132 million on Enzo Fernández. This time around, the clubs of the Premier League parted with about $100 million between them over the course of January.There are several reasons for that. One is that received wisdom has long had it that January does not lend itself to value: Most managers and executives now hew to the inverted Groucho Marx logic that anyone clubs are actively selling in January is not worth buying. It is possible to land a carefully-chosen target, of course, but it costs.Gio Reyna was a rare January import for the Premier League, leaving behind Dortmund to join Nottingham Forest.Tom Weller/DPA, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More